I am careful about Galileo. You see a lot of Catholics trying to rewrite history by presenting the Galileo trial as a simple scientific debate where Galileo lacked proofs of his hypothesis.

Actually I find it very suspicious that the author of this article skips the trial altogether.

We have the minutes. We have the judgement. Even if Galileo was an ambitious asshole Ith political afterthoughts, one important fact remains: The Church used the literal interpretation of the Bible to contradict a scientific theory.

This is the main point and the main problem of the Galileo trial and why it is significant. Galileo deserved opposition in a debate, not condemnation in a religious tribunal. It happened and the blame is solely on the dogmatism of the church. From this point, science diverged more and more from religious teaching and stopped seeing the church as an ally.

I haven't seen any Catholics yet trying to rewrite this history. I have seen atheists correcting incorrect beliefs about this period of history. I'm protestant and not a fan of the RC church hierarchy, but I do care about an accurate representation of history, and the Galileo trial is muddled with fairy tales and misinterpretations, because people don't know the context.

But whatever your religious beliefs are, Galileo did lack proof. His model was wrong. His idea was correct (though originally from Copernicus, of course). But without proof, and without a correct model (which Kepler later provided) there was no way at the time they could know it was correct. There was simply no scientific basis yet to accept it over the existing geocentric model.

The RC Church's position on science was not homogenous. Various officials have said that if an interpretation of the bible ever conflicted with verifiable observations, then clearly the interpretation of the bible must be incorrect. Obviously not everybody agreed, but heliocentrism did have its supporters within the church. It was not considered heresy until Galileo made his position impossible and alienated his biggest fan (pope Urban). In any case, Galileo's theory here, his model, was simply incorrect, and they knew it. There was a solid scientific basis to contradict it. They did pile on a bunch of other accusations, but that's primarily because he angered the wrong people.

Galileo did receive opposition in debate. His problem is that he didn't accept it. He wanted everybody to accept his model, despite the lack of a scientific basis for it.

> But whatever your religious beliefs are, Galileo did lack proof. His model was wrong.

You know who else lacked proof? It didn't bother you just as it didn't bother the inquisition. Maybe try using the same standards for those theocrats as you apply to Galileo.

The whole point is that geocentricism wasn't just dogma, it also happened to match observations. It was the null hypothesis, if you will, and Galileo failed to disprove the null hypothesis.

Geocentrism could not explain retrograde motion of inner planets. This alone disqualify it as a serious hypothesis. Galileo may not have had solid proofs but geocentrism made absolutely no sense.

Geocentrism only selling point was dogma: the idea that our planet was important and had to be in the center of the universe. That was the main reason to defend it.

Geo heliocentrism was an attempt to keep this, but really, it makes little additional sense: it is basically a frame substitution for a heliocentric model and required some orbits to cross each other if you wanted to assume the outer planets orbited the Earth.

Galileo had no solid proofs but lots of evidence: respective sizes of Earth and sun (there was an intuition that bigger objects were harder to move) the fact that other planets have moons.

The fact that a man had to fear for his life for having an opinion doesn't bare mentioning? All Galileo had to do was follow the rules as set out by the Inquisition, and all would have been well.

It was all Galileo's fault!

Is it a fact that he had to fear for his life? We're not talking about the Spanish Inquisition or an accusation of witchcraft here. He was questioned and got house arrest.

Of course it's still not good to get punished for dissing the pope according to our modern freedom of speech, but in those days, insulting rulers was still frowned upon. And Galileo went well beyond simply having an opinion; he insulted the pope. Not merely by ignoring the pope's instruction to present both alternatives in a balanced way, but by putting arguments from the pope (a good friend before this) in the mouth of a character called "Fool" (Simplico).

No. Galileo feared for his life more than once during decades of persecution. He was lucky to avoid torture. Read Heilbron's biography, or even just Wikipedia.

This notion that Galileo insulting the pope was some sort of rhyme and reason for his persecution is wrong. It's commonly accepted that Galileo had no intention of insulting the pope, and the pope didn't take it as an insult (Heilbron goes into much detail) . There is some minor evidence involving the rumour that someone suggested to the pope that it looked bad, but this is not at all the central reason for his persecution.

Did you get this from the Dava Sobel book? It's takes an awful license with history. Her Longitude book is the same, it's just wrong in so many aspects while presenting itself as accurate.

The church did not call Galileo's position unfounded. It called it absurd and heretical. To justify the latter it quoted the literal interpretation of the Bible.

"Galileo was fully aware that if his wished to cash in then he had to get his priority claim in tout suite....Now he had hit the jackpot and needed to cash in fast. He bunged his principal discoveries together in book form....his ego inflated by his recent successes....the sycophantic cheers of [Galileo's] high powered fan club....Beguiled by his silver tongued friend Barberini gave Galileo permission to write and publish a book....it is safe to say that he got stamped on for his hubris....Galileo was never the fearless defender of scientific truth or freedom of speech that his modern fan club like to present him as. He was an extremely egotistical social climber with an eye on the main chance, his own undying fame"

I think it's safe to call this an attack on Galileo's reputation. It does match my fuzzy understanding that the story we got in elementary school was not that accurate, but on a personal level, it's pretty mean spirited.

In particular, to modern ears, it's pretty jarring to hear a man convicted over scientific arguments described as being "stamped on for his hubris".

Exactly. It reminds me a lot like the defenders of the Soviet Union's house arrest of the dissident Andrei Sakharov -- the argument was, "He should have known what the reasonable limits of criticism of the government were. And the authorities didn't shoot him or anything the way they would have done in Stalin's time, so they were being quite reasonable".

If the author had left it at that, it would have been a better series.